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From AP:
After Sept. 11, it was necessary to “draw a line in the sand here, and the country to do it with was Iraq because they were in breach of U.N. resolutions going back over many years,” [Blair] said. “I took the view that if these people ever got hold of nuclear, chemical or biological capability, they would probably use it.”
Blair was asked about the leaked memos, which suggest strong concerns in the British government that the Bush administration was determined in 2002 to invade Iraq — months before the United States and Britain unsuccessfully sought U.N. Security Council approval for military action.
...According to the minutes of the meeting, Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of Britain’s intelligence service, said the White House viewed military action against Saddam Hussein as inevitable following the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush “wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD” (weapons of mass destruction), read the memo, seen by the AP. “But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
In the interview, Blair said raising such concerns was a natural part of any examination of the cause for war.
“The trouble with having a political discussion on the basis of things that are leaked is that they are always taken right out of context. Everything else is omitted from the discussion and you end up focusing on a specific document,” he said. “It would be absolutely weird if, when the Iraq issue was on the agenda, you were not constantly raising issues, trying to work them out, get them in the right place,” he said.
I don’t get the criticism of GWB based on these memos. Is the theory that the GWB administration should not have considered military action against Iraq until the morning it went to the U.N. Security Council seeking approval to do so? Was GWB expected to seek such approval from the U.N. without wanting to get it?
